WSL3 Performance is about 5-60% faster than WSL2 depending on the workload | Hacker News Reader

WSL3 Performance is about 5-60% faster than WSL2 depending on the workload

tonym.us

227 pointstonymet223 comments

Following some of the comments about switching to linux the big one that enabled it for me is AI. I love to thinker, but sometimes I just want things to work and linux is known for very minor inconveniences that are pain to alter because you have to learn what kind of god forsaken build system the application uses and how it integrates with the desktop environment, but now I can just ask AI and it will be fixed by the time I want to use that feature.

Another big thing is getting lookingglass working. I could not for the life of me figure out what I was doing wrong when I followed the setup guide 1 line at a time, but AI figured out the problem and it it working in 1 hour. And yes it took AI one hour to figure it out so you can assume how long I've sent trying to get this to work.

Now I run a custom kernel with custom KDE and several compiled new packages which would require the effort of a small team, but now it's possible to do with few prompts and it's relatively easy to maintain indefinitely.

Also AI got me off jetbrains onto nvim and I haven't been this happy writing code.

Same experience here. I've dabbled with Linux Desktop in the past but always backed out once I encountered the rough edges. Just because everything is fixable doesn't mean I want to spend a couple of hours on each of the 100 paper cuts. It adds up over time and feels never-ending.

But now, I just open Claude Code and say "this is bothering me" and it runs in the background while I complete other tasks. I get it to document anything it changes and push my custom configs into a private git repo along with my dot files.

In some sense, I'm starting to see Linux almost like a Smalltalk image. Anything permanent is backed up to git and I have documented recipes to go from fresh-install to custom environment in a couple of hours.

There are still a lot of rough edges all over the place but it is a totally workable environment.

You would love NixOS.

I think you are right. Right now I'm on Fedora because I asked the LLM for the most boring and reliable Linux distro for doing development. I'm at the point in my life that I prefer stability to many other attributes - I like boring tech and Fedora is boring.

I'm waiting to see if Omarchy switches to NixOS for their next major release. I have ~100GB of unpartitioned space ready for experimentation and NixOS is the most likely candidate.

I bounced around distros for a good while and nothing ever stuck until I tried Fedora. Now Linux is all I use. It's low friction and low maintenance.

Plus I went and installed a bunch of cool desktop effects so it's cool to me now :)

Everytime my system updated my flat pack and Nvidia drivers get out of sync. Claude easily fixes it.

A recent update crashed in the middle and left me running an incorrect kernel for my GPU drivers, if I had of rebooted I'd have been hosed. Thankfully Claude caught it before that happened (steam games refused to run) and fixed me up.

In related news - not a fan of flat pack.

In my update notes I have a warning to always do a btrfs snapshot before a system update. And my system update warns me when kernel changes (since that usually requires new drivers for Nvidia). And to wait after flatpak updates for the driver to finish compiling (since apparently the flatpak installer exits as done before the background akmods compilation finishes)

So, yeah, I feel that pain. So far I've been careful and/or lucky.

I jumped ship from Windows a couple of years ago after having used it since the early 90's. One of the primary reasons was how much I had to fight with WSL2 in my day-to-day work. But now it's becoming even more apparent that Microsoft does not care about its operating system. I don't even know what they could do to get me back. Trust continues to be a huge problem in the AI era of Microsoft.

WSL has been god send for corporate employees who get a windows laptop but need to do real work.

But everyone knows that performance of WSL is nowhere near native linux on the same machine.

Honestly the performance hit of WSl even being alive and running in the background of my XPS was so bad I just ssh into a workstation and do everything on there instead. Trying to get windows to just be usable is such a massive pain in the ass.

Would be ok, except for the fact that I like to run GUI applications on linux as well. Remote access for gui is a pain.

Luckily I'm allowed use Hyper-V for Linux work

Guess where WSL runs on?

Some of us also do real work on Windows, ask Valve.

Sure and there are billion dollar systems at every bank that runs entirely on VBA macros in excel doesn't mean its not structurally flawed.

Worse is better, isn't that the UNIX motto?

Usually when it's misunderstood

Yeah, it only applies when it is convenient.

Yes, software is supposed to be convenient, making user's life miserable is proprietary software's job

Do one thing, and do it well.

Not even UNIX System V userspace obeys a mythical rule that only exists on a worshiped book by the FOSS community, most of which never used anything besides GNU/Linux.

Of course they haven't. The old Unixes are dead and gone.

The shell grows not old, as we that are left grow old:

Aix shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of Sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

And these VBA macros in excel probably don't have any more bugs and issues than all the software written by the HN community. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Is the excuse of teenagers every August when they ask for the latest and greatest laptop?

I can provide other examples of real work done on Windows, like Photoshop, DAW, and so on.

Maybe those are interesting as teenager hobbies as well.

I write Ada that targets Windows and COM, which I consider to be real work.

Interesting take since Valve with Proton has done a lot to increase gaming on Desktop Linux also their console devices.

Except they pay CodeWeavers to do most of the work.

Delightful way to write off an enormous cohort of people and huge variety of work.

I spend most of time in meetings and updating excel sheets.

Recently I needed a certain agent to help me automate some Excel stuff. Getting it to work in Windows was significantly harder if not impossible compared to WSL.

Being exactly in GP situation, I would give a more charitable take.

We are not talking about a properly configured Windows workstation. We are talking about corporate PCs configured by an IT department that is completely oblivious to the needs of developers, most likely because developers are not their bosses. WSL is effectively an escape hatch.

Usually the stated reason is "security", and developers tend to do the greatest sin of corporate security: they run arbitrary code, and they even have the nerve to call it "their job"!

I don't work in corp IT, but I am convinced that people there are not stupid and they are fully aware of the "shadow IT" aspect of WSL, but they give it a pass because they are also aware that people have "real work" to do that would be impossible otherwise, given company policies.

> I don't work in corp IT, but I am convinced that people there are not stupid...

No, not stupid, per se. I generally don't like to blame people for the situations in which they find themselves. But there is something else going on.

I find the folks in such IT departments are generally not very good at their jobs. One potential reading of this is that it is not the people working in the jobs' fault, it's the design of the corporate leadership by not paying well enough for the job to get better people.

But the knock-on effect would be, if corporate paid better, at least my IT department would look completely different. The people we have now would be replaced by much more competent people. These more competent people would also generally be folks who shower and wear clothes that fit, that they don't let one corner of their shirts hang out the waist of their pants, that didn't show up to a service call wreaking of cigarette smoke. I'm not expecting people to spend more money on nicer clothes, I already established they don't have that money. I am expecting people to take care of their basic hygiene and present themselves as best they can. That they don't is a signal they don't really care about their own professional development. If corporate paid better, IT wouldn't be staffed by a bunch of literal slobs.

Though they are in a bad situation, I don't have a lot of respect for the folks in my IT department, because the only job they have, the one they have been sticking to for some time, they are only doing the bare minimum. I've been poor. I've been in jobs I hated. The only way out was to suck it up, present myself well, get better at my job, and go somewhere better. I have a hard time respecting anyone who just gives up.

(To be fair, there actually are a few who do appear to be doing this, but they are few and far between. They also don't last long, because again, they go on to something better. I'm talking about the kind of people who don't put in the effort and then complain they never get anywhere.)

>I find the folks in such IT departments are generally not very good at their jobs.

Because their job is keeping their job, not making the 50 developers in the 5000 person org happy, as those are not their bosses.

You judge their competency from the perspective of a dev in the trenches, but the way management judges their performance is vastly different: keeping IT cost center spending as low as possible(hence a lot of IT offshoring) and security as tight as possible (hence MFA, EDMs and MDMs shoved everywhere that don't led you run anything besides notepad and Edge). Whether this hampers the devs or not is irrelevant for them or for management (outside of purely tech companies) since this is the devs' problem to deal with, not IT's problem. The moral is as long as it's seen as a cost center and not a profit center, there will never be right incentives to have a competent IT department staffed by competent people.

And keep in mind that a lot of the hidden champion engineering companies that make the world go round still function on excel sheets with VBA scripts as their "tech stack", and as long as that runs, management is happy. If you tell them you want to run linux, python, node, docker on your notebook, they'll probably laugh in your face thinking it's some hacker alien gobbledygook.

Having a dress code would help filter out those who don't fit in.

Why on earth are you devoting more attention to their clothes and smoking habits than their IT skills? I can believe those are bad too, but come on.

Frankly, based on the description above, it's very hard to separate the two. If someone is that unkempt in their day to day life it's very hard to believe they'll have their shit together at work for years and years. It's fine to wear the wrong type of clothes, but clothes that don't fit right and not showering are really bad signals.

It’s been blocked at companies I have worked at. In one case it briefly worked but thereafter WSL lost network access.

> We are talking about corporate PCs configured by an IT department that is completely oblivious to the needs of developers

I definitely agree with that part though I've not used Windows at home for many, many years...and I'm a gamer.

What is "real work" in this context? I'm guessing from the context it's Linux kernel or driver development? Or perhaps bioinformatics workflows which use linux-only programs in some cases, especially with CLI-driven workflows?

I think that because the majority of people in HN work building SaaS, they tend to do Linux server related work heavily. The ones that dont, do iPhone work, so they are in a worst place (with Windows).

Other than that, I believe the productivity tooling is better on Windows.

I myself fall in the SaaS category, so Windows doesn't give me anything. On the contrary for whatever reason after mainly using Linux/OSX for 15 years, Windows just feels clunky and like it "gets in the way". WSL is a good hack/workaround, but unless I MUST have Windows as OS (because of a work provided Laptop that cannot be Linux), i dont see a point of using WSL.

I wholeheartedly agree that Windows just gets in the way. It’s not designed around user ergonomics. It’s designed to maximize clicks and screen-time, which are exactly the opposite metrics an OS should care about if they want good UX.

Luckily my IT staff allowed me to dual boot windows and debian+cinnamon. Everything was going great until I needed to compile and test a legacy firmware using Keil uVision... Gonna be on windows a while longer unfortunately :(

> maximize clicks and screen-time

This doesn't make any sense. I regularly use Windows for a few things, and do not have this problem. Sane corp group policies disable all the annoying things folks complain about on the default consumer install, and there are few things you can't do just using a keyboard and keybindings.

I still prefer Linux and KDE is my daily driver but most of the comments I read here about Windows seem to be people regurgitating second-hand comments they read and passing them off as their own, and it's always the same small list of things every time.

You say that Windows is fine if you have a whole IT department taking on the burden of fighting against the annoyances, but then accuse people who complain about those annoyances of regurgitating second-hand complaints!?

I just re-installed recently for gaming partition. Some of the things I need to disable are annoying, but yes they're still fine.

> fighting against the annoyances

Because they're trivial annoyances. I spend just as much time disabling or changing annoying things on KDE (or MacOS), I don't see the difference other than "Microsoft bad!" At the end of the day the same amount of my time is wasted. I'll save my moral outrage for actually important things.

Yea... My experience is Windows is usually a more out-of-the-way OS than Linux distros I've used. On Linux I fight the permissions system and routine hardware/software setup can break parts of the OS and I end up troubleshooting on forums.

Linux to me feels like it's designed for multi-user systems and servers, where I use it as a single person to launch software.

Lots of popular programming languages and compilers are dog slow on Windows compared to Linux. You also typically have a bunch of corporate spyware slowing the PC down, which is firewalled because it can't look into the WSL environment.

A lot of stuff in WSL 2 is often faster than doing it natively on Windows as a result.

Those machines generally come locked down, so you need permission to install stuff like WSL. I had such a machine and asked if they could unlock WSL, and their answer was no, because Security was busy enough keeping the Windows installs reasonably secure. Which makes sense tbf. Would be surprised if that was much different in other places.

WSL is getting better, even with minor releases. It's the only reason I didn't switch my most recent corporate provided laptop.

Sadly the rest of Windows 11 suffers from those unasked, opt-out feature drops. Unbearable. So, I'll go pure Linux again.

For me Win11 was the final stop.

I still use Win10 for a few things, including testing stuff works there too, via java. I switched to Linux in 2004 or so, though.

Did you work out of /mnt/c?

I suspect they did. 100% of cases where people complain WSL2 was slow and I helped debug was this specific incorrect usage.

My problems weren't performance related, aside from the occasional catastrophic memory leak; most of my biggest headaches were related to networking.

Also no, I didn't.

They finally fixed the networking thing a while back.

In current WSL2, Windows owns the IP address, the NIC, DHCP, ARP, etc, and it’s shared with the Linux VM.

It’s really kinda magic… Linux sees the same IP address as windows does, and you actually get address-in-use errors if Linux tries to listen on a port Windows is already listening on, and vice-versa. So there’s no NAT going on or any internal 172.x net within the Linux VM, you just run “ip addr show” and you see the same real IP addresses that “ipconfig” shows you in windows.

(I no longer have a windows installation but WSL2 got noticeably better with networking some time before I gave up on windows.)

Not sure if related but you can adjust how WSL releases virtual memory back to windows which will lower your memory usage

I had the opposite experience.

I'm a hardcore Linux user, but it's a fact of life that laptops are not very well supported. There are some that are very compatible, but generally speaking, I need to trade off software (Linux compatibility) for hardware (laptop choice) or viceversa.

WSL allowed me to choose any laptop I want and run the subset of Linux that matters for me. For my use case (that is, not quickly accessing huge amounts of files, performance was ok - as a matter of fact, the author of the article got a very reasonable performance loss on realworld tasks (-4% ~ -16%).

The only thing that I found truly irritating is attaching USB storages, but I ended living with that.

I'm surprised to hear that about laptops. When I first switched to Linux in 2003, laptops were supposedly a somewhat iffy thing. When I got my first laptop in 2007, I had to do a bit of research, but ultimately ended up with a ThinkPad where everything worked fine, modulo the need for proprietary graphics drivers as was common at the time. Since then, I don't think I've ever stressed about whether a laptop would be properly supported. I am easily believe that maybe some things are a little better in Windows (maybe automatic firmware update, or the CPU governor), but which laptops are "not very well supported" by Linux these days?

Does Linux support hibernate or suspend well, 30 years after both technologies have been introduced?

Not even Windows hibernates or suspends reliably. Apple seems to be the only vendor that can get this right.

I've been using hibernate on Windows for the last... 15 years? And I don't remember ever having a problem. Lenovo and HP laptops.

Hibernate and Suspend never worked well for me or my coworkers or relatives when we tried it on Windows.

I never understood the point of hibernate/suspend. Just turn off your laptop when you are done.

I don't know what "well" means, but I suspend my laptop whenever I move it around, travel, etc. I used hibernation a lot many years ago, where it worked as perfectly as I would expect.

Yes. The initial problem was ACPI tables in the BIOSes. They were wrong for benign (Windows doesn't care about them much, so the manufacturer was not aware that they are important), or not-so-benign (break them to break Linux compatibility on cheaper devices) reasons. Suspend and Hibernate work pretty flawlessly on higher end devices (i.e. Thinkpads, Pro/Elitebooks, Compaq NX series, etc.) for longer since these machines were designed as OS agnostic and had flawless BIOSes in terms of implementation w.r.t. consumer devices.

Remember, Halloween documents' opening salvo was the idea of extending ACPI so that Linux becomes unbootable on PC hardware.

Hibernation is the same deal. You also need to have a swap file/partition slightly larger than your RAM, since it's dumped to SWAP during hibernation.

So, why don't you come over here? We have cookies.

In the mid to 2000's at IBM, many of us developers and even quite a few regular business people in marketing ran Desktop Linux on Thinkpads, it worked extremely well. I assume they still do.

I never trust people saying "it works well". Heck, even Canonical lies in their certification program, since they may test with custom distros that they may not release (yeah, it's this crazy).

My last machine, according to reviewers, worked "well" on Linux. After I purchased it, I've found that the battery lasts half of what it lasts in Windows. And other stuff.

No doubt that there are 100% compatible machines (Thinkpads, typically), but again, it limits choice.

> I'm a hardcore Linux user, but it's a fact of life that laptops are not very well supported.

No, that isn't a fact at all. I use Dell laptops and have run Desktop Linux on them (Ubuntu past years and more recent switched to Kubuntu) and all of the hardware has worked well, even for gaming, even for my laptop with nVidia built in.

Dell, having one of the most popular engineering laptops of the past decade (xps). It's not surprising that it would have better than average support.

me when i lie

Yeah, WSL was the gateway to daily driving for me. I'd played with Linux as a kid, came back via WSL, and quickly came to the conclusion I'd be best off without Windows.

Haven't regretted it for a second.

I did the same, fighting WSL constantly with some other random conflicting stuff. Moved to Ubuntu and honestly things just work. _Maybe_ 2026/27 will finally be the year of linux desktop.

I am done with windows. WSL is not good enough and will never be enough, to offset the sheer instability and unpredictability of windows on my machine. Even if it were stable and predictable it would never be as free as in freedom like Linux to do whatever you want with it. Apparently windows problems like randomly failing wifi are rather common on the Lenovo legion 5 laptops from 2021.

Anecdata: Windows has been rock solid for me for over a decade, including the latest versions.

Given raw Linux or WSL I'd choose WSL 9 times out of 10.

Honestly I feel the Windows hate is forced or due to self-inflicted issues.

No it is not forced. I jumped ship the day they force upgraded "selected" users to windows 11 and left others in the dust because their hardware was "incompatible"

Why would you prefer WSL over native Linux? What's the rationale here?

> Why would you prefer WSL over native Linux?

I have a number of both. I like WSL for when I'm working in Windows and need to run some quick bash and handle the output in Windows file explorer.

Today I'm working on a project that runs bash scripts in WSL; it utilizes multiple unbound servers (that run in Ubuntu minimal and in pfsense).

Because you want the best the both worlds, but it makes people think Linux has no GUI so it just keeps them locked to windows

They are very afraid of replacing Linux with windows, don't know how it's done, what it is etc.

Or they use software for which there is no Linux build or version with feature parity. That still exists.

Or they prefer the GUI in Windows like some people prefer the GUI from Apple. Those preferences still exist.

Nobody stays in Linux for the GUIs? Heck if it purely a GUI decision I'd move away from the horror of Linux, the fact that the best "GUI" being told are TUI tells you more than enough of what people's priorities on Linux are.

I would switch over to WSL in a heartbeat if speeds were 60-80% of bare Linux (cpu/memory) and every other subsystem was interoperable / accessible with Windows (cough network) which was my main issue with WSL, anything that wanted to run services was a disaster in WSL (DB/exposing port to host/etc).

GUI of what?

For example, you can't pry KDE out of my cold, dead hands, ever. The capabilities of the desktop and the standard KDE installation blows anything I have used out of water easily.

We (as in Linux users, sysadmins and devs) love our TUIs because they work transparently over SSH. I have more than 100 servers which I reach regularly. I neither want to install a full graphical user interface, nor forward it to my desktop to manage them.

If you want to discuss this, I'm chill & all ears.

With debloat, Windows 11 is a great experience. And WSL makes it easier to test out various distros . Lots of great windows apps. Great Terminal, VS Code, Great Browser with MS Edge. Hyper V is a decent hypervisor and easy to work with. Windows 11 is very nice. and RDP is excellent. Overall I prefer Windows 11 + WSL over a Linux desktop experience.

> Windows has been rock solid for me for over a decade, including the latest versions.

I have many Windows, FreeBSD and Ubuntu instances in use. They're all pretty great but none are the best fit everywhere.

It's self inflicted. The type of person that complains about stability is the same person who runs the windows decrapify stuff that fucks with the registry and changes what Windows expects to be true. They'll block updates as well. After they've got their system into a really deep place where it was never meant to be, they are shocked when shit breaks randomly. Windows is not Linux. Leave it alone or don't use it.

I have never messed with the windows registry not updates and neither have most of those with windows problems on the Lenovo legion 5, when I put Linux on it, all problems disappeared like magic

Problems with a single Lenovo laptop model seem more like an issue with Lenovo's drivers than an issue with Windows

I have never messed with the windows registry nor updates. Windows will just randomly like not show you the start menu, not show you icons, mess with file operations etc.

This is a compatibility problem with my hardware. I couldn't believe all issues just went away when I switched over

I understand where you are coming from, and it's not uncommon. I have never formatted and reinstalled Windows 2000, for example.

On the other hand, given raw Linux or WSL, I'd choose raw Linux 20 times out of 10.

While I had my fair share of problems, for the last 20 years, Linux allowed me to be closer to hardware, allow me what I want to do with it and even more stable and performant than a "rock solid" Windows installation. I dual booted Windows and Linux until ~2022 IIRC, just for gaming, and no, I don't miss that bloated thing.

I have a Windows Laptop for my wife and a VM for specialized software which has no Linux counterparts, and even that limited exposure is enough to remember why I don't miss that thing. The experience is inferior to what I have on Linux.

> Honestly I feel the Windows hate is forced or due to self-inflicted issues.

Uh, no. I can't self inflict ads, bloat, performance issues and other papercuts by installing from an official ISO, using my legitimate license, and playing the Microsoft's way of using my online account during install. These are bundled with Windows itself. I even didn't install Microsoft PowerTools to these installations. They are "that" vanilla.

I’m at roughly 7 years without Windows. PopOS has been rock solid for the entire time, and I installed it mostly by accident. I can just click to install games from Steam, my containers run unbelievably fast, as do my games and media. I even replaced the hardware, and the system booted up and just worked. The only issue I had was installing conflicting NVidia drivers, at which point all I had to do was boot into a terminal and run: sudo apt remove drivers && sudo apt install drivers. I rebooted and boom everything worked.

I stopped using Windows when I got an update prompt while playing a game that had two options I had never seen before, and was shocked to see at the time: “Now” or “Ok”. After clicking “Ok” the system waited a few minutes and then rebooted, causing me to lose the game, and get issued a short ban for leaving a game. And that was just the final straw. A few months prior, a Windows update corrupted two drives (NTFS) and I wasn’t able to repair them. Probably six months before either of those I was left with an inoperable system after a botched driver update for my (NVidia) GPU that caused me to do a full reinstall. Those are just issues I can remember.

Windows was a nightmare for me, in a way Linux has not been. In fact Ive had such a good time in Linux, I stopped buying Macs as well.

It’s not self-inflicted or being forced to hate windows, it’s just that for a lot of folks, myself included, Linux is a measurably better experience. If Windows works for you, that’s great, congrats I’m happy for you. But I think it’s weird to say Windows hate is forced or self-inflicted.

Agree, I feel you only hear from people who hate Windows and for every such loud opinion, there are probably 20 who are quite satisfied but never mention it.

Angry people are more likely to want to make themselves heard. But Windows' problem isn't technical, like performance, stability, compatibility, etc. It's actually great in some of those aspects. The problem is that Microsoft is working hard to shovel shit on top of what could be a great OS. That shit is the part aimed at extracting more from users for MS' benefit. That's not what an OS is supposed to be, certainly not a paid one.

For every 1 person who hates it, there's probably 50 that don't know or care what the problem is. They just decide that laptops or desktops are meh and use a phone for everything and are satisfied.

I think your experience has been unusual. My experience with windows has been buggy patches that occasionally break my computer, bizarre and hard to track down performance issues, and features that I immediately want to not only disable but completely remove (anything copilot related, for instance)

It's also just plain disrespectful to users. For instance, having to hack the installer to allow for local user accounts, forcing edge on me constantly to the point where even when I change the default browser, things still load in edge, and it still reverts my settings on occassion. Using Windows actively makes me hate microsoft. I'm mostly just on Linux and Mac now, I only use Windows when I absolutely have to.

Linux does have annoying technical issues to fix on occasion, but I'm a lot more tolerant of them because I feel like the creators of it respect me and my rights, whereas Microsoft treats me like I'm renting my own computer.

I think your experience has been unusual.

Windows has hundreds of milions direct users worldwide.

If it was that unstable as HN tries to make it, then a outrages would be in news every week

It is so unusable the market share of Mac is increasing and google sees an opportunity with googlebooks

> Windows has hundreds of milions direct users worldwide.

A BIG chunk of these are captured users working at Big Corp™.

I work at a company of 100k+ employees. The enterprise-managed Window machines we're issued are unbelievably bad. But I'm 100% sure if Microsoft pulled a Darth Vader "I'm altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further" and 10x'd the price, nothing would change. Maybe at 100x (or the point of actual unaffordability).

People just put up with it because they don't know how to use anything else. My nephew (who has no idea what Linux is) was complaining his laptop was slow and unstable.

This is how it is with a lot of modern tech, btw. Most people just suffer using it.

Similarly, interest in restoring/repairing older vehicles has increased because people are so fed up with using modern cars.

I drove a modern long-wheelbase Ford Transit last week when I moved house, and the whole experience was constant annoyances. Often the tech wasn't working correctly. I daily drive a 30 year old vehicle (which runs perfectly btw) and wasn't aware of how bad modern annoyances are.

e.g.

- The backup camera didn't work properly.

- The speed warning was incorrect, e.g., it thought I was speeding when I was actually 10 mph under the speed limit. The speed limit on that road has been the same for at least 7 years, and the van was 4 years old.

- Lane assist was constantly moving the wheels and taking over what I was doing. I was bang-on in the middle of the road. It was very jarring to have the wheel move when you haven't turned the steering wheel. It scared the absolute shit out of me when it first did it, I honestly thought there was play in the control arms.

- The driving awareness check said I was tired for some god knows what reason, and I had been driving for all of 20 minutes!

- It also said I wasn't holding the steering wheel when I had both hands on it.

- I couldn't feel the clutch biting point at all. Maybe the clutch was electronic as well.

- It had the most annoying electronic handbrake as well. Required you to hold the button before you could pull away the first time. This worked differently than if you were using it at a traffic light.

I know people that bought older vehicles (people in their 30s) because they dislike this stuff as well.

People just put up with this crap on Windows because they often don't have any other choice because, quite frankly, most people have no idea what Linux is and don't really understand how a computer works even at a basic conceptual level.

If your problems stem from Microsoft's invasive updates and policies, I'd suggest switching to Windows 10 IoT Ltsc Enterprise, https://massgrave.dev/. It's a version meant for stable systems like your ATM machines, which means minimal AI bloat pushed to you. Startup is really fast too.

Spread it around. MS needs it's head screwed right.

Yeah Windows is solid for me.

Tried a few Linux distrod last year and had endless issues.

MS keep doing dumb stuff with the UI but there's tweaks to solve everything and it's similar to tweaking/ricing Linux so I didn't see any particular advantage of Linux.

NixOs is one that intrigues me though. I absolutely love the idea of OS as config files.

Unfortunately Nix seems to have so much drama and barely any 2 users can agree on the best way to do something.

I heard Rumours DHH/Omarchy might take a crack at simplifying/integrating Nix

Some user friendly Nix concept would make me switch asap

It isn't. The last time I bothered installing Windows got into an unrecoverable update problem on Windows 11, which forced a reinstall. Couldn't use a local account without having to use workarounds.

Manage to get through all of that, and I couldn't activate without signing into Microsoft because it took my key I had for Win 7 and used to upgrade to 10 and associated with my Microsoft account. So I had to basically use mass grave activator to fix that.

It then decided to rewrite my entire EFI partition (which wasn't on the same disc and had nothing to do with Windows) and give it a new unique identifier. This made Debian unbootable as a result, and I had to use a rescue USB to rebuild the EFI partition.

When I log in, everything wants you to log into Microsoft. The debloat script is now basically mandatory to have it work reasonably well.

Win 11 is just shit. I am not some sort of FOSS zealot. I just got fed up of fighting Microsoft every time they did a major OS update.

> Apparently windows problems like randomly failing wifi are rather common on the Lenovo legion 5 laptops from 2021

Unfortunately I have some bad news for you about random device drivers on linux. I guess with AI you can now fix the driver upstream yourself though.

À lot of laptops from that era came with unreliable WiFi chips and there was no recall because of supply chain shortages

The problem disappeared when I switched to Linux

My budget Beelink with Windows 11 Pro has been one of the best development workstations I've ever had. Maybe 1 crash in 5 years?

And with WSL, very easy to jump between any linux distro. Debian, Ubuntu, Alpine, Arch -- anything.

I moved to Linux 8 months ago because of how crappy windows 11 has become. One of the things I loved about windows was developing on it, WSL2 was great and I loved just having VS Code connect to it and it’s my own little dev box.

I’ve really enjoyed the switch so far, having attempted it a few times in the past and ended up going back to windows (once in 2003, another in 2012). It’s encouraging to see MS continue to get the developer experience right with improvements like this, but unless they make significant improvements to the OS itself, I won’t be going back.

After many years of failed switching attempts, I finally made the move to CachyOS 2 months ago. Windows 11 updates constantly force-feeding copilot and not letting me shut down my system without updating is what finally pushed me to give it another honest go.

I want to caution people though because I see posts like this all the time, but nobody mentions just how tough it is to mimic the "polished" look and feel of Windows in Linux. Even getting it installed in a dual-boot setup was an absolute nightmare. If it had not been for Claude, there's no honest way I could have made this transition. It would have ended just like all my other previous attempts: going back to windows.

Here's a list of issues I documented along the way (with many more that I didn't document), some of them resolved with other methods (I game on Windows VM with GPU Passthrough now) and some I live with:

- Not able to choose same display resolution as Windows, especially when mirroring my laptop to my monitor. Most offered resolutions are too slow or too blurry with text also.

- Having to force browsers to use my dedicated nvidia GPU instead of the Intel one, rendering simple web games in browsers is still choppy even with this solution.

- Choppy games (RDRD2, Last of us 1 and 2) when using Proton/Lutris/Wine despite 3080 GPU (these games run smooth in Windows). Kind of expected this...

- Blocky artifacts showing up in most games (tried multiple drivers and Proton flavors)

- Have to disable secure boot in BIOS for some reason otherwise bootloader doesn't work

- Come up with hacky solutions to not get prompted for root password every time I connect a removable drive that is Bitlocker Encrypted

- For some reason when shutting down/rebooting, my CPU fan just stops cold turkey and it makes a "thud" noise. I've found no resolution and it only happens with linux.

- I can't control where applications on my taskbar live. If I place a pin in the middle and click it, the app launches a separate instance at the far end of the taskbar. Tried different sort options, no fix. Some apps work fine, others don't.

- Can't click shutdown/reboot when screen is locked. Need to click "Switch User" first.

EDIT: should mention some other pain points: support for broken software is very slow moving due to so many distros and flavors. If you update a package for security reasons and it breaks functionality, you could be stuck waiting quite a while (sometimes a month) for it to get fixed.

Also earlier this week CachyOS black-screened users that updated their OS, we could not even get to the login screen. The solution for me was obvious, just rollback to a snapshot, but some people couldn't even get that to work. When users complained or offered solutions, I saw one of the mods get snappy and basically blame users for updating too quickly. I mean, I get WHY that would occur, but it seems like such a weird thing to scold people for. The community is still very abrasive to Linux newcomers, but this has been the case for decades.

If you want a polished OS look thats closeish to Windows I cannot recommend KDE enough.

I setup a new main PC (Nvidia GPU) with Arch and GNOME a couple of years ago and had quite a few problems. I switched to KDE and have had almost 0 problems for day-to-day work and gaming. Every once in a while I’ll run into an issue with running a game that I can usually resolve pretty easily with AI. It seems the work Valve has done with KDE and Proton has really added a lot of polish to the experience; I’ve always preferred Linux over Windows but now the tradeoffs for me are almost non-existent.

This is absolutely true, and was my experience as well, it did take quite a bit of work to get something as functional as windows setup.

I went with Arch and wanted to take a few days to actually go through the Wiki and setup something completely from scratch and learn along the way. I had my laptop next to me and AI was a huge help. I went with Hyprland(Fish for shell, Kitty for terminal, Ashell for my bar, Walker for launcher, Yazi for explorer) and tried installing a bunch of pre-made .config files, but that was a big mistake, just take the time and get everything setup yourself, it's worth it in the long run to learn how all this works under the hood.

I think it's important to point out that my switch was also motivated by a desire to learn about the guts of a linux system and not just go with Ubuntu or a ready made one. I run Ubuntu on a home server and it runs great, but I am a full blown Arch snob now and I could never daily drive it.

Which distro did you switch to?

Arch, I took a few days and just did the full walk through from the Arch Wiki (there is a streamlined install process someone made[1]). I had my laptop next to me and AI was a huge help, but I learned a ton doing it and it was satisfying booting into a graphical interface for the first time!

[1] : https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Archinstall

Cool!

WSL2 is a different product from WSL1, not a different version. Is WSL3 now a different version of WSL2 or another separate product?

Looks like a different version of WSL2 with a newer kernel and newer VM host software

An evolution, better said.

Now there is virtio support, finally no need to depend on external CLI tools for what should have been in the box on day on.

Until now, even for Windows containers, we needed some Docker compatible CLI tool.

It's the same thing. Seems like the major version bump is to advertise WSLc, which is like Apple containers - an SDK for launching Linux containers as part of a Windows app.

I guess windows containers where dead on arrival?

Not dead on arrival, just extremely expensive on arrival for commercial/production use-cases, unless you're using Windows Containers on Azure.

They're missing things like winget as well, but that's mostly an inconvenience rather than a blocker.

Not dead, but they are ridiculously buggy. Much like WSL.

Windows Containers, owing to how NT itself is put together, are incredibly awkward to use. Container images have to go all the way down to smss.exe (the NT equivalent to init), which ties you to a particular kernel patch level.

Upgrade the container host? Re-bake your container images. It's a massive pain in the ass.

Yeah, I wasn't familiar with that (being all day working with Linux containers), and past week I found you cannot build images nor run Windows containers unless the host and the image match on the major Windows release. No backwards compatibility either.

So, for example, you cannot run a Windows 2019 container in a Windows 2025 host (nor the other way around). So, upgrading a base image means upgrading all the containers running in that host, and also the host itself.

Great job in benchmarking! I wasn't even aware of the WSLc (WSL3) release. For others, the release info is available here: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/releases/tag/3.0.1

EDIT: stumbled on the previous HN post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49970507

That is quite relevant, and compose ability is on the way, or for some workloads Aspire would be an alternative I guess.

Unfortunately most companies are too cheap to pay for Docker Desktop, and having Windows containers depend on a third party tool has been a problem in such customers.

Because using Rancher Desktop or Podman isn't also a given, due to similar issues.

Dockefile is still a thing.

And?

Is it accurate to call this WSL3? WSL 2 was released in 2019, but WSL 2.0.0 was released in 2023 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/releases/tag/2.0.0

No I think it's more accurate to call it WSL Containers, or WSLc, but the release is indeed WSL 3.0.*.

It happens to be the major version reported by `wsl --version` on my system.

    NRR-WT1; wsl --version
    WSL version: 3.0.1.0
    Kernel version: 6.18.40.1-1
    WSLg version: 1.0.79
    MSRDC version: 1.2.7214
    Direct3D version: 1.611.1-81528511
    DXCore version: 10.0.26100.1-240331-1435.ge-release
    Windows version: 10.0.26300.9457
    NRR-WT1;

great to hear it thanks. I stumbled upon it on that HN article on containers, and since I’ve run doing other WSL benchmarks lately (testing kernel mitigations , which have a huge performance impact on the guest container), I re-ran those benchmarks on the upgrade.

I love WSL, but giving this a major upgrade label (2 to 3) seems a bit of a stretch, at least from the viewpoint of an average dev user.

Perhaps it reflects the amount of work and thought that has gone into it, but I really think the optics are better if the selling points are immediately obvious to the user.

Hopefully some light will be shed in further blogs.

Especially given 1 -> 2 was a complete rewrite that changed the entire architecture to the extent that there are still reasons to run WSL 1 in some cases. Talking of which, the one thing I'd be excited about (if I ever expected to do any dev on Windows again, which I don't) would be a way of sharing local storage between Windows and Linux processes without incurring a massive slowdown on one side, which WSL 1 achieves, but it doesn't sound like this has that. (Or does it?)

I think MS is calling it Wsl2 still (3.x series) . Let’s see if they shift the naming like MacOS did with the numbering. (It was 10.x for the longest time then they ditched it)

I moved to Linux from WSL2. It works surprisingly well today as a desktop OS (using it since ~1992 on servers, 20 years of OS Macs before Windows on desktop). And it looks to be perfect for AI - Claude did build and test a noise gate mic pipeline easily because every config is in plain text files.

I love Linux and use it for everything except my desktop for 20+ years now. Too many times even in the past I do an update the distro and then something stops working and then I have to spend a day fixing. Last time (6mo ago) it was my sound card. Small little annoyances that steal hours of productivity. LTS was going good until I wanted to update to the next LTS then the can of worms gets opened. It’s fantastic when it’s fresh and everything works and you can blow it away easily and reinstall. I’ve never found upgrading packages to be reliable long term without eventually having to do some manually recovery or reinstall OS

> Too many times even in the past I do an update the distro and then something stops working and then I have to spend a day fixing.

On Ubuntu starting in 2006 and Kubuntu the last several years, what you're describing doesn't and hasn't happened to me.

When I've tried other distros over the years, the issue you described has happened to me on:

    Red Hat Enterprise Linux
    Fedora
    SuSE
    Debian (yes, even Debian but it was with the unsupported drivers and the issue was in a WiFi driver)

But it has not happened on Ubuntu or Kubuntu since I started using them in 2006. We use desktop Linux on several machines here and have for a long time, from Dell to HP to Lenovo.

Yup, tried ubuntu. Probably gotten over a hundred of their free CDs in the mail over the year to give out. Milage may vary based on exact hardware. It works until it doesn't is the story. Too much variation in consumer hardware for linux to ever be reliable for majority. So many combinations of motherboards, graphics cards, wifi cards, sound cards, etc. I even bought lenovos officially linux supported laptop etc to try to fix the issues.

I bent over backwards for ubuntu, suse, fedora over the years. Sometimes it would be years of stability in between, but it would always come back to bite me if i ever tried to trust it as my primary machine.

> It works until it doesn't is the story.

No, that's not my story nor is it the story of the vast majority of Ubuntu/Kubuntu users.

> Too much variation in consumer hardware for linux to ever be reliable for majority.

That's a false statement, too many of us out here using Desktop Linux to try and make such a claim in 2026 (or even 20 years ago for that matter).

> I even bought lenovos officially linux supported laptop etc to try to fix the issues.

Tens of thousands of us developers in IBM used Desktop Linux on Thinkpads and later Lenovos for your statement to not ring true with me.

> I bent over backwards for ubuntu, suse, fedora over the years. Sometimes it would be years of stability in between, but it would always come back to bite me if i ever tried to trust it as my primary machine.

Those statements do not represent a truthful reality the majority of Desktop Linux users experience. This isn't 1996 in a random Linux IRC channel.

I honestly can't remember the last time an update broke anything for me in 20 years of linux, and rolling back to last stable has always been easy.

That's across various Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and even a crunchbang install.

In the past, especially on my custom desktop with uncommon GPU, sound card, and wifi chip, I'd check for compatibility and give it a few days after releases were announced to see if there were any user reported bugs. Knowing that devs prioritize compatibility for the most common devices first, I may have to wait my turn. If no, update. If yes, check for available solutions, update, apply solutions. If no solutions, wait.

But, for instance, currently I've been updating this Fedora 44 lenovo with the crunchy kernel roughly weekly for about a year, have been doing so blindly (just sudo dnf update && reboot before bed), and have not had a single problem in all of that time.

It's the same model as Windows- don't do shit before you know. You don't just install random garbage on a Windows machine, and you certainly don't allow automatic updates that re-enable features you've disabled, disable your ability to disable those features, break your menus, put ads on your lockscreen, put ads on your desktop, put ads in your menu, break hibernation, break wifi printing, or whatever other insane shit they've done in the last few years. You wait to update until you know all that broken shit has been removed or stay on XP until they pry it from your bloody knuckles or trust that some random dev doesn't have spyware in that de-bloated iso you've been thinking about.

Linux currently receives development from Intel, AMD, nvidia, google, facebook, qualcomm, amazon, and even Microsoft. Long gone are the days of the wild west governed by but a few.

"my sound card."

Yes, for me today though this is usually fixed in 5min by Claude.

Lot of the WSL2 lag is not the VM itself, it's the 9P file sharing and interop.

I found that seems like anything under /mnt/c goes through 9P

And yet I had results perfectly within the range of "good enough" having an ai harness muck about in a work folder in a docker mount on a 9P mapped drive under permanent observation by an intelliJ instance on the Windows side before some buggy Windows update made it occasionally lock up under `npm i` sized filesystem loads. Crazy how far we've come.

There is virtio support now, and to be fair 9P was never an issue for me.

9P is very slow for certain operations (such as, for example, git from either direction).

virtio is not enabled by default because its buggy in certain corner cases, and will be enabled by default when it stops doing that. That said, I do have that enabled, it is certainly faster.

Since nowadays I use WSL to run immutable containers, and not really classical Linux Desktop, it isn't something that bothers me.

Agents take more time than building Docker images.

You’re not supposed to work out of the /mnt/c. A lot of people make this mistake and then complain that WSL is slow. On the native linux file system WSL is 100x faster for everything

From the perspective of user empathy, wsl seems to be designed for that use case. but the implementation/defaults can be improved

On my work laptop I made the lazy/naive mistake of mounting my projects from macOS into devcontainers running in Colima.

vscode extensions using ripgrep in parallel in the background (there are many!) are killing the vm.

I now decided to follow Mitchell Hashimoto choice and use VMware Fusion and simply do all my work inside of it.

>You’re not supposed to work out of the /mnt/c.

Source?

Microsoft now launches a pop-up discourging this, so that is my source. Also my own personal experience using WSL for 8 years.

You can very easily measure this as well, use any disk benchmark

That's the entire appeal of WSL (for me). A single source checkout I can work on from both sides; no inconsistency of forgetting that I need to apply changes twice.

Without it, I can just as well ssh into another box.

Trust me, its not worth the performance cost. Just use git push and pull across the /mnt/c boundry

I do this on wsl1 without issue. wsl2 has an experimental new virtual (or just remote?) fs you can enable but I have not tested it.

I've generally found it better to do it other way around - keep all the stuff in Linux partition and from Windows side access that over the virtual network share \\wsl.localhost\<Distro>\home\me\whatever

I do not really follow how you would avoid this if you are using WSL containers with dev containers. Wouldn't this be the default?

On top of the performance issue you mentioned, /mnt/c will be case-insensitive and trip up lots of Linux software!

That feature is faster as well (using virtiofs instead of 9p), but i use the native VHDX IO for my work, which is adequately fast.

What made a significant jump from WSL2 to WSL3?

Unless I'm mistaken, WSL to WSL2 was massive change in complete architecture, with WSL2 now requiring virtualization and making your host-OS run on top of hypervisor, with potential tradeoffs not many users are typically aware of. Basically, WSL and WSL2 were different beasts entirely :)

Was there anything that big or note-worthy from WSL2 to WSL3? Or just a natural evolution/upgrade?

WSL3 is the app version. The underlying mechanism of how Windows runs Linux hasn't changed. The change from WSL to WSL2 was in that mechanism (WSL: run via syscall translation, WSL2: run via VM). This is an app change, so it covers the interfaces of how you can start running Linux code, but underneath the hood, it's still a kernel running within a VM.

The big addition here is the support for containers. The app now provides a simple way to run containers directly. Underneath the hood, there's still a kernel running on a VM, though. There's also some improvements to the filesystem layer, a kernel upgrade, etc.

This article[0] does a nice job explaining it.

[0] https://zenn.dev/yohakucode/articles/wsl3-wsl2-wslc-update

I had to speculate using the changelog, since MS hasn’t released performance tests . Kernel 6.18 has a better scheduler and other refinements. WSL3 improved the clock routines to use a synthetic clock. There are quite a few others.

virtiofs is the biggest change, it was experimental in 2.x. It doesn’t affect my application, but most new users who want to share files between windows + Linux will see a huge bump.

for those intrigued by the name: WSL3 is just WSL2 3.0; it's still just Linux under Hyper-V, not a new architecture.

syscall/basic getppid() throughput 1,474,691 ops/s 1,533,399 ops/s +3.98% Entry/exit latency 0.6781 µs/op 0.6521 µs/op -3.83% sched/pipe 100k process ping-pong 48,445 ops/s 54,589 ops/s +12.68% Context switch latency 20.64 µs/op 18.32 µs/op -11.25% sched/messaging Hackbench (20 groups, 800 tasks) 14.507 s 13.047 s -10.06% mem/memcpy glibc default bandwidth (1GB) 7.84 GB/s 12.64 GB/s +61.35%

This is great, this is some good work. But, like an issue I described before with Linux kernel io-uring[1], this fails to test and demonstrate performance with a healthy server load.

This obviously fails to depict a healthy server load because it's just way too specific.

1.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44604793

You're not wrong, it's a synthetic test. I went with this suite to AB test other WSL kernel flag changes, and used it for testing 2.x vs 3.x when I noticed my builds seemed a lot faster with the upgrade.

There are probably better benchmarks.

Are majority of the perf gains really from tuning from the kernel's `page_reporting_order` param?

i think the 6.18 kernel scheduler contributes most of the gains, but it's hard to distinguish which improvements led to the biggest gains. also the clock change (no longer context switching to the host to sync the clock)

I find that stuff that it offers over a normal Hyper-V VM is stuff that I don't need, leaky abstractions galore.

Well, you can use linux-tools on windows too. I kind of compiled most of LFS/BLFS on it, and it works. So it just gives you more options.

Nowadays I use it mostly for Linux containers.

how about the usability? for me it's 1 step to wsl --import and ~5 steps to setup the disk, networking, instance etc in Hyper V.

auto mounting host disks in the guest is very nice.

Also, I prefer the .wslconfig parameters e.g. for kernel params, networking, memory + cpu caps. It's very convenient.

Despite the container support getting most of the attention, I discovered a measurable performance improvement with WSL3 by accident. Luckily I had another machine to upgrade so I ran an AB test comparing WSL 2 to WSL3 .

If you want a real bump in performance, I have a clever trick . Hardware isn’t cheap these days, so we demand the most of our software.

> If you want a real bump in performance, I have a clever trick . Hardware isn’t cheap these days, so we demand the most of our software.

Good trick: get rid of the superfluous Windows layer which stands between that expensive hardware and your target OS. It takes up valuable memory, CPU time and storage space, introduces latency where you don't want it, exfiltrates data to unknown destinations and can decide to "upgrade" itself without warning.

Good tricks need catchy names to succeed so how about NoSL?

"Arch btw" vibes

I get a lot of utility out of windows, the desktop, the browser, Hyper V , MS Excel, RDP, Windows Terminal, Visual Studio + VS Code. A dozen more great apps.

I came here to praise both Windows and Linux.

Ditch Windows. Install Linux. With Claude, your headaches go away.

I've never enjoyed Linux desktop. I love Linux command line tools. WSL is the best of both worlds for me.

Isn't this just WSL2 v3?

I’ve never been good at marketing. And that was tongue tying

But you’re right the core wsl2 architecture (run the kernel in a VM and a bunch of distros off of it) is the same.

I am not sure about WSL in general right now - no matter if WSL3 is more performant.

For me, Claude bypassed my sudo security by executing `wsl.exe -u root`. The Claude does not need any sudo password :)

You need to start Claude in WSL, not from outside in Windows. Windows user has complete ownership over the WSL it launches

The funny thing is: I launched it from within WSL. But it can call wsl.exe -u root from within WSL.

I was very surprised this works, but that was Claude’s solution to editing a config file that needs sudo access without knowing the password (it edited /etc/fstab)

Disable interoperability

My memory is a bit foggy, but the original WSL promised a much more ambitious integration with Windows, sort of container-like. It had a lot of rough edges when I first tried it, but they promised they'd work on it. That, together with their promise that W10 would be the 'last' Windows and they'd switch to a more OSX-style rolling release model was what pushed me to adopt Windows in ~2016. In the first years of Nadella it really felt like MS would listen to developers. Within less than two years iirc they'd given up on the WSL ambition, with WSL2 being a mere VM with noticeably worse performance for some of my workloads, and completely reneged on their W10 promise, even vowing to make my newly purchased hardware obsolete.

In summary, I really couldn't care less what improvements they make to WSL, and neither should anyone else, imho. If you want Linux, for the love of god just use Linux. Emulation works great the other way round by now.

Do you run your workloads on Windows partitions/filesystem but using WSL2 as the runner? That's how you end up with abysmal performance.

We tested this in the office with equal laptops. CPU workloads have almost no VM overhead and the C++ / Rust compilation workloads on purely WSL2 virtual disk image is only 2% slower.

Yes WSL1 was more ambitious but the fundamental differences in the NT and POSIX makes it quite hard and CPU workloads suffered.

Yes, I don't remember what it was, probably something with file sync, but I remember I kept a WSL1 instance for some stuff for a long time. Rust tooling worked great in WSL2, as long as you stay inside the VM, can confirm.

MS Office is notoriously resistant to running in Wine (haven't tried it myself) and, with all love to LubreOffuce, it's clearly the poor relation.

I've usually been able to get windows software running, but it's not always easy. I borrow my wife's laptop to reprogram my gaming mouse, for example. Couldn't be bothered any longer to dick about with wine.

But this is slightly beside the point: many have to use the allotted machines at work, which will tend to be windows (or maybe mac). That's the audience for WSL. It is an escape hatch for wage slaves.

The original WSL translated syscalls. It was a very tight integration. It was not perfect, and i should think it was a massive ongoing effort. I think it's an elegant approach bit i can see why wsl2 is essentially a vm. I never did any benchmarking, but i suspect that what wsl2 loses in disk performance, it gains in kernel performance. I never found either variant slow, and my corporate laptop was shit. My vagrant stack was diabolically slow, though.

Try WinBoat, it's different technology and works really well. Haven't tested with Office specifically though.

As it happens, the itch resurfaced and i just discovered winboat! It appears to be the exact counterpart to WSL, what a lovely symmetry.

I built my desktop. I do own an unused retail windows licence, and i think I've even activated windows on this box, but the key is not in the BIOS. I'm curious how that's going to work.

Tangent, in case my folly gives you a chuckle: my mouse, of the windows-only reprogramming tool, is a zerotes c18. I got busy with a dremel and did a _side project_ on it, only to discover that the thumbstick has only 1-key rollover. It's useless as a controller pad because it only supports the cardinal directions. I am a silly billy.

I have no problem with WSL2 being a VM of sorts if thet at least had VirtualBox of 2010 vintage features like properly integrating USB devices, not whatever this usbipd crap is, or a window manager that doesn’t inexplicably die and require a full machine restart.

I'll agree WSL1 was more of a commitment to Windows Kernel. but I've found WSL2 performance to be great unless the plan9 filesystem is used.

and I am using linux. When I execute code, it's executing via the Linux kernel, on the cpu . This is not an emulator . Intel has had hardware virtualization for ~ 25 years or more.

Instead of pushing WSL2/WSL3 I would be more interested if they invested in making Cygwin faster. The only use of WSL I ever found, is to run Podman or Rancher.

ok great benchmark! I work with herdr/pi for dev work and need to use a windows machine from my company. WSL currently unfortunately lags so much when typing, not sure why when using herdr... Using powershell, some features are missing, so i can't wait to try WSL3 and hope for improvements.

... does it lag on the shell or does it lag when you are in some vibecoded "TUI" njs monstrosity? Because if the latter, the issue is probably not cause of wsl...

herdr might be the culprit there, it can significantly slow down tui apps with its terminal capture. This happens on mac/linux, WSL will surely make it worse.

The TUIs alone work fine, so something must be done by herdr to make it slow...

People still use Windows? What is it like now? Everything AI? AI in textpad?

Many industries are sadly coupled to Windows, for years to come. There's no getting rid of a lot of legacy software/code. Oddly enough, Microsoft has rolled back their forced Copilot, in a rare step in the right direction.

Could get all the performance back if you just ran Linux natively.

I just hate the fact that I am to start a new contract at a Windows shop because IT hates Mac. Most people there would want a Mac given the choice, among the other developers, there is also a Linux crew. But no! It dept says no, so they hold the rest of us hostage.

Why are you like this?

> Most people there would want a Mac given the choice

I don't think so. A PC with Linux is always the right choice. Macs don't even give you the option of a tower with a dedicated GPU, they are pathetic nowadays.

I have talked to them, it is a dev shop, this is what they said.

You can Linux all you want, I prefer Mac and I have done Linux extensively.

seems like a self-imposed constraint.

Can we just flag every “omg just switch to linux” post this is supposed to be about WSL not Why Linux Is Great And MS Sux thread 736748166488391

I switched back to Windows after using Linux for years, simply because the promises of better software never emerged. Maybe AI reverse-engineered apps like that Adobe Creative Suite clone in Rust will start to change things, but I don't really want to hang my hat on an app that could go away at a moment's notice.

Too bad Windows 11 is a crapware

Win11 adds crapware; it also makes some of that crapware difficult to remove.

But once that crapware is exorcised, Windows can be useful.

WSL is one of the few good ideas Microsoft had in the last ... 5000 years or so.

Typescript, vscode, LSP, powershell, kernel subsystems, the HAL, C#, F#, DirectX, side-by-side libraries, a VMM that fucking works. Exchange, SQL Server. Great hardware.

It's a crappy company, like all corporate giants. It has a lot of crappy products. But the case is usually overstated.

Even going back 10 some good ones

* Windows Terminal

* Powershell 7

* Including OpenSSH client + server with windows

* the Visual Studio command line build toolset distribution

* Hyper V and bundling it with Windows Pro

* RDP

* MS Edge (basing on chromium, same extensions, same dev platform)

And yet it's still factors faster without a whole Windows around it.

Unfortunately that acquisition option isn't available in most physical stores, where normies buy their computers, even though there isn't a single OEM not running some distro on their data centers.

everything I use it for executes virtually instantly, 60% slower than virtually instantly is still virtually instantly.

If something is slow on WSL, but not on bare metal linux, it means that the application is slop that only works when MAXING OUT your CPU, it's slop, the app is the slop

Yeah, I haven't dual booted in decades, it started with Windows 7 and VMWare Workstation for me.

The Year of Desktop Linux is delivered on VMs.

Most of the overhead in virtualisation of the sort used by WSL2+ is not CPU throughput, but other hardware access (mostly IO, but for GUI apps display access can have a significant penalty). Things that are just spinning a couple of CPU cores doing number-crunching work and similar see significantly less penalty in VMs than those that perform much IO, unless of course there is much competition for host resources or for some other reason they get passed around cores so see many more L1 cache & TLB misses.

Some things need to max out the CPU, certain compile steps for instance, that is not slop that is code doing its job. Others need significant IO, often random IO, certain other compile/link steps for example, that is not slop. Sometimes if you knew your code was likely to be run in a VM rather than on bare metal you might design it slightly differently to reduce its sensitivity to the detrimental effects, but not having done so doesn't make your code slop. There might be some room to blame slop for UI slowness as a lot of code out there updates their display in an in inefficient manner that is actually noticeable on bare metal too, especially when it unnecessarily uses 3D accelerated compositing or similar and something causes that to fall back to software rendering, but even then if it works well enough in the intended environment calling it slop is perhaps unfair.

You can get a refund for that useless Windows licence but that is a bridge too far for most "normies" whether they buy their computers in brick-and-mortar stores or online. If that process could be streamlined somehow..

Links to benchmarks?

There’s always going to be a tradeoff with usability. Even on Linux you’ll run containers or VMs to prepare your developer environment (servers aren’t running Arch).

You’d be impressed by how fast WSL runs. I’ve got other optimizations on the blog for even more performance tuning with pretty massive 2x-5x gains.

Interesting, hacker News has truly become the new slashdot :)

-1, Flamebait

Amazing they managed to make virtualisation that slow in WSL2

Microsoft still refuses to fix the most obvious issue here - Windows should be rebuilt on top of a linux kernel.

As someone develops for both systems, I would argue doing the opposite is better from the OS design perspective. NT has a much better paradigm than Linux or any POSIX-system. We should move away from POSIX in the age of AIs. The OS should be more granular in its permission handling to its core. NT can do this. Linux requires a complete rethinking and rewrite to have this in the syscall layer. Current extensions like SELinux are hacks. Something like seL4 should be the basis of future OSes. NT is simply closer to that.

> NT has a much better paradigm than Linux or any POSIX-system.

I am not sure what you are smoking, but that thing must be good.

This should be mandatory reading for arch-btw users: https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/windows-nt-vs-unix-design

And one update later.. its goone.. wasted.. some jscript horror of add riddled always on game took it and ran with it. Imagine a department winning performance and one department squandering it meet for lunch in ms cafeteria. Akward..

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